The Whale Hunt is a beautiful project by Jonathan Harris - storyteller, visual artist, computer scientist, anthropologist, data voyeur, photographer, digital anthropologist, interviewer, and designer - that really pushes storytelling to a new level. Harris is the designer behind We Feel Fine and many other unique online story-telling experiments of sorts.

Here's Jonathan's description of the project -"In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. I documented their traditional whale hunt with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, taken at five-minute intervals for seven days, and at even higher frequencies in moments of high adrenaline. This established a constant “photographic heartbeat” that more or less matched the changing pace of my own heartbeat, and which recorded every moment of the hunt. I then developed a framework for experiencing this story, allowing the viewer to rearrange the photographic elements of the story to extract multiple sub-stories focused around different people, places, topics, and other variables."

Here's the ways you can see the photos, and then once you begin to click through, you can change the constraints of what you're viewing - only pictures in Barrow Alaska, about so and so, doing just this, etc etc.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

This is like perfection to my OCD, organization and mapping obsessed design brain.

I love the differences between the right side layout of these two cities. The New York City grid I love (and appreciate daily) becomes so very straightforward and dull when you restructure it like this, where the intricacies of the Paris city plan become far more evident and endearing. Its hard to find much evidence of any right angles at all.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Here's the follow up to my earlier post showing a sneak peek of cotton ball sheep. This is a short and quite silly stop motion I did to try to illustrate (in a very small part) a bit of Newtons First Law of Motion (as per assignment instruction) while making it mildly education just for fun :)

The idea is that falling letters are used to introduce all of the narrative elements. Using this same concept, two more videos will be forthcoming :)

Here's the photoshoot set up - highly technical as you can tell haha I didnt even have a tripod so I had to tape my camera to stack of moleskines - oy

Here's the shoot from a little further back where you can see how the cloud was actually suspended from, yes, dental floss taped to the lights. Again, highly technical right here haha. It refused to stop spinning, so I had to take each shot only when the cloud faced the right direction.

This is one of my stills for the video, before the post processing I did to add the eyes and emotions.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The heart will be in Duffy Square from Feb 10-20 and it depends entirely on volunteers to actually work. The heart is composed of 6 pairs of metal rings held in the air by volunteers and any extra Time Square visitors who want to participate.